


St. George and the Dragon

by LunarRabbit



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Ahamkara (Destiny) - Freeform, Deal with a Devil, Gen, Parley, Pre-Game: Destiny 2, ahamkara guardian, please do not call him a furry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23049631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunarRabbit/pseuds/LunarRabbit
Summary: FLESH OF THE AHAMKARAExotic | ?????"I really wish to not die."O savior mine, stop the hunt. I'll grant you a wish. Hear me out - wish that, for the Traveler's sake, wish it or we both die-
Kudos: 19





	St. George and the Dragon

> _ I really wish to not die. _

Some Guardians are stereotyped as self-serving assholes looking out for number one. The truth is, it’s not the job, it’s the person working it.

Survival was, after all, about you first. You have more guns and ammo than the other guy. You have more food than the other guy. You have more water and transport than the other guy. If you didn’t, you were dead.

It wasn’t just the person. Everything in the galaxy was looking out for themselves - Traveler vs Darkness, all the way down to the bacteria under your foot - all of it fought each other to live.

And if you couldn’t fight, you found something to escape the other guy before he beat you to death.

...He really should stop getting philosophical each time he was about to die.

He couldn’t help it - it distracted him from whatever inevitably shitty fate was coming from a mile away - either a painful death that couldn’t be scrubbed from his systems, or Zavala would probably personally throw him off the Tower if his Ghost was playing dead and they all got back home safe.

It was the first time he’d seen an ahamkara not smile. The teeth were there, but - he read once that when apes smiled, it was to assert dominance or show fear.

Now, he didn’t know much about dragon body language, but being curled up, shivering, and bleeding from Gods knew how many holes scratched ‘dominance’ off the list.

“Yeah, me, too, friend,” the Guardian said, leaking oil and sparks from his chest.

The two regarded each other for a while. Seconds ticked by. Blood splattered to the ground. The distant screams of guns and dying dragons and the howl of a Guardian who'd just lost their Ghost rang in the cave again and again.  


The cold got a little bit sharper, even through armor and bone.

“Tell you what,” they both said, in unison, and both found their eyebrows raising (or whatever dragons called their eyebrows).”Call it a draw.”

“Agreed.”

He didn’t have a horse in this race.

Funny, that’s what he was just thinking.

That said, he wasn’t so sure about making a deal with a thing that once convinced someone to eat their own family.

-wasn’t so sure about dealing with an undead monster that kills thousands of people without a thought-

-wasn’t so sure about dealing with-

-a being of pure selfishness.

Wishing was better than dying.

Neither of them had a choice, they tell themselves.

* * *

Nowadays, when he thinks hard enough, or gets hit hard enough, he gets flashes of what happened.

The strongest was him shattering his jaw, feeling his faceplates bend and crack. He assumed that’s what it was like when a regular human broke their skull.

Pushing bones into plates until they splintered and scarred. Feeling them grind against where teeth should be. He heard the ‘get your face rearranged’ as a threat somewhere, and it was his last laugh he could muster before something crashed forward, like a sledgehammer into metal, denting and warping and expanding forth as it cracked and bent-

Eyes dimming, becoming hollow, popping and sparking as they sunk into a void no light could touch.

Metal crushing, rendering, melting under a fire that shouldn’t exist. Like throwing bones into a heat only the stars could dream of.

Something dimming, fading away in chunks, the way something dissolved in water became part of it. Another thing, trying to latch on and consume everything, pleading for forgiveness that was too weak to be truth but too sorrowful to be a lie, but it's too starved to even eat, fading away just as fast-

And that’s about as far as he can think before he remembers he’s supposed to be a Guardian. Guardian of what, he didn’t know, but he could feel it in his bones, to overuse a joke he’d heard too many times.

He gets the distinct feeling people aren’t happy with how he’s turned out. Oh, sure, there was hard evidence - if he ever took off the cloak around the Tower or took the wrong turn, there’d be a million different ways of executing him he’d love to see.

It was a fulfilling pasttime - finding guard routes and trusting Guardians who didn’t care about the dragon bones he ‘wore’.

Even when he was alone, it felt like someone was complaining behind his back to someone.

He feels like he should care. Sometimes he does.

Sometimes, he just takes it out on some enemy of humanity. It didn’t matter, as long as he could shoot or stab something, feel the way teeth sunk into flesh or steel.

Ambushes were his favorite. It was like eating a hearty meal after a fast. The look of shock was the same, even if he was up against killer robots or astro zombies. The utter bewilderment, the scant few seconds of trying to unfuck yourself before Light ripped them apart.

He feels like he cares less when he does things like that. Trick a Crucible opponent into thinking he was down that corridor when he was, in fact, waiting around the corner with a shotgun. Leading Fallen and Cabal across minefields from the years before the Golden Age. Half-truths and misdirections - all of it felt real, somehow.

Deception seemed to be the only thing that made him feel a little more real.

The greatest deception, after all, was acting normal in a universe like this.

**Author's Note:**

> A background I wrote for a Destiny 2 RP thing, about an Ahamkara Guardian. Bungie, stop being cowards and let me be a dragon with a gun.


End file.
